American politics

Gossip vs smears

TODAY is turning out to be very difficult for me because I already praised California and now I have to defend Sarah Palin. As my colleague notes below, Todd Purdum has published a long, detailed, very critical essay about the governor. Many of the anecdotes will be familiar to people who followed last year's campaign and its aftermath, though there is some interesting new reporting (notably that Mark McKinnon, the former Bush/McCain advisor who had said he would sit this one out rather than campaign against Barack Obama, came on board to help Mrs Palin prepare for debates). An interesting aspect of the piece is that it freely crosses the admittedly thin line between juicy gossip and vicious smears. This, to me, is gossip:

At one point, trying out a debating point that she believed showed she could empathize with uninsured Americans, Palin told McCain aides that she and Todd in the early years of their marriage had been unable to afford health insurance of any kind, and had gone without it until he got his union card and went to work for British Petroleum on the North Slope of Alaska. Checking with Todd Palin himself revealed that, no, they had had catastrophic coverage all along. She insisted that catastrophic insurance didn’t really count and need not be revealed. This sort of slipperiness—about both what the truth was and whether the truth even mattered—persisted on questions great and small.

And this, to me, is an anonymous smear with a hint of misogyny:

All the while, Palin was coping not only with the crazed life of any national candidate on the road but also with the young children traveling with her. Some top aides worried about her mental state: was it possible that she was experiencing postpartum depression?

The open question here is whether Mr Purdum or any of those concerned aides (but not concerned enough to speak up at the time, naturally) have ever actually met a woman experiencing postpartum depression. Later in the piece Mr Purdum mentions that he came across multiple people in Alaska who mentioned "without prompting" that they had hauled out the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" and realised that Mrs Palin suffers narcissistic personality disorder. Armchair diagnoses from unnamed Alaskans. With all the well-documented nonsense that has come from and encloaked the governor and her associates, this needs to be included?

Alaskans are certainly qualified to opine about narcissism. Indeed, all they need do is look in the mirror to get a good look at one. Selfish, reactionary, ignorant, living off the excess economic rent of collectively owned mineral wealth and feeding at the federal trough at a greater rate than any other state for decades. Good times in Alaska. And they gave us Sarah Palin! What a state.

Andrew MD's comment is very amusing; better in fact than the article he is commenting on. I suppose though that one would have to concede that 'diagnosing' a candidate is rather an underhand piece of labelling that they cannot easily combat. Having said that, 'Gossip vs Smears' is much more charitable to Palin than she is of her opponents. The apparent lack of remorse that characters such as Palim express when wielding the political sword has at least the whiff of something worse than the unsavoury.

Yes, this is a smear. But imagine a die-hard Republican watching the debates only to hear Palin say:

"Ya know, we had no insure-ans until Todd joined a yoon-yun. With or-gan-eye-zed laybor on our side he got a job working for a foreign power that I cant see from my house; one of the foreign powers that pays money to be there so Alaska can write checks to all of its citizens just like a socialist state. Byoo byoo!"

(that last part is her shooting guns... oh wait, that was Tina Fey who did that... redacted.)

So at least one of her aides did a good job - the one who talked her out of bringing that up...

Slipperiness of truth or no, I'm not sure it would have been a good political strategy for a GOP candidate in this day and age to admit that she depended on a member of the household getting a union job in order to obtain decent health insurance.

This post perfectly captures something that has always bothered me about the rabid reaction to Sarah Palin from those on the left. The woman is so clearly unfit for national office that attacking her seems totally unnecessary. But from the left she's been the target of much more than just the standard political attacks. Much of what's been written about her by otherwise sane commentators clearly crosses the border from sane criticism into crazed hatred. Why is that? My personal theory is that what they are attacking is really the (already debunked) "myth" of Sarah Palin as a self reliant, successful female politician who is also a firm adherent to the agenda of the Christian right. Of course, they can really stop now and move on to other slay other dragons. No one really believes she is qualified for anything more than the local school board at this point except for a handful of bumpkins in flyover country.